Outside The Confines: Overreactions

Good morning. Let’s get right to the videotape.

• It’s the time of the year to overreact to a few games. It’s a tradition. Gabe Lacques has five possible overreactions to opening weekend.
• Matt Snyder has seven overreactions to the early results.
• Michael Baumann doesn’t call it overreactions, but he does have eight “takeaways” from the first series of the season.
• No one is having a better start to the season than Guardians rookie outfielder Steven Kwan. Ryan Lewis looks at the historic start that Kwan is having to his season.
• We had a historic first in last night’s Giants/Padres game. After Giants first-base coach Antoan Richardson was ejected, Alyssa Nakken came on to become the first woman to be an on-field coach in a regular-season MLB game.
• Reds chief operation officer Phil Castellini, who got the job after an exhaustive search to find the best candidate and it just completely coincidentally turned out to be the son of the owner, apologized to fans after he said that the only alternative to the current ownership was the team leaving town, so they should just zip it.
• Mark Belko reports on the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette analysis of Pirates financial records shows that the Pirates made enough money on concessions alone to pay their team payroll from 2013 to 2015.
• The Nationals owners aren’t necessarily behaving badly, but the Lerner family is going to explore a sale of the team, according to a report Barry Svrluga.
• The Nationals themselves say that they are just going to concentrate on playing baseball and not worry about a possible team sale.
• The new collective bargaining agreement was supposed to help end tanking. Jesse Rogers explains why it didn’t.
• One thing it was also supposed to do was put an end to the worst service-time stunts. Ben Lindbergh argues that the record-setting number of top prospects who started the season in the majors indicates that it’s having a positive impact.
• Phillies infielder Alec Bohm had a rough couple of days, but it all turned out fine in the end. After Bohm was booed after making three errors on Monday, he was caught saying “I hate this [expletive deleted] place” after getting a sarcastic cheer for a routine play. But Bohm apologized and got a standing ovation the next day.
• Yankees outfielder Aaron Judge rejected a contract extension from the Yankees and will become a free agent at the end of this season. Jay Jaffe looks at what Judge’s future might look like and thinks that the reported offer he got from the Yankees is likely to be the best offer he’s going to get.
• Andy McCullough spoke to several big-name players to get a sense of what it is like to be playing your final season before reaching free agency. (The Athletic sub. req.)
• Dan Szymborski has a list of potential breakout hitters for 2022.
• Ken Rosenthal has some Ken Rosenthal-stuff, including the Red Sox first impressions of Trevor Story and some players first impressions of the PitchCom system. (The Athletic sub. req.)
• The Mariners signed shortstop J.P. Crawford to a five-year extension worth $51 million. Ben Clemens evaluates Crawford and thinks it’s a fair deal for both sides.
• Justin Choi evaluates the trade that sent Trevor Rogers to San Diego and Chris Paddack to Minnesota. There were other players in the deal as well.
• R.J. Anderson has a scouting report on Roki Sasaki, the 19-year-old Japanese pitcher who just threw a 19 strikeout perfect game in NPB.

• Emilie Miller, the daughter of Giants broadcaster Jon Miller, explained why she rooted against the Giants in the playoffs last year so that her dad could be with her grandmother who was sick with COVID.
• Scott Merkin has an update on the health of Hall-of-Famer Harold Baines, who had a heart and kidney transplant last year. The good news is that Baines went to the White Sox home opener yesterday.

• At the plate, at least, Angels star Shohei Ohtani is not having a great start to the season. So Ohtani decided to perform CPR on his bat in the dugout last night.
• I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Savannah Bananas, but there was this the other night.

• And finally, I believe that Dee Strange-Gordon is going to be suspended for this vicious pitch to the arm of Travis d’Arnaud.

And I think he’s only eligible for an Emmy. We can also file this one under “overreactions.”

And may tomorrow be a better day than today, Buster.